CiF Watch Prompts Guardian Correction of Livni Quote

CiF Watch, a CAMERA affiliate, has prompted a correction of a Comment is Free article by Michael Brull in which he truncated a quote by former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, misrepresenting her description of the Palestinian view on Israeli settlements as her own view.

Livni knows perfectly well why Israel builds settlements. In another candid moment, she explained that the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that it is impossible we already have the land and cannot create the state.” Livni admitted that this “was the policy of the government for a really long time.” She claimed that whilst it “is still the policy of some of the parties”, the government policy has changed. That was a less candid moment.

However, it’s Brull who is being “less than candid”, as his quote is a mischaracterization of what Livni said (during negotiations with the Palestinians in 2007), as documented in the “Palestine Papers” released by the Guardian in 2011. Indeed, as was widely reported at the time, the Guardian was forced to issue the following correction to a story they published on Jan. 24, 2011 which used the same Livni quote.